obstruse

Here’s the odious Joe Klein from this week’s edition of his column in Time magazine:

“There aren’t so many high-paying manufacturing jobs anymore; the relative security of government work doesn’t need to be augmented by ridiculously obstruse procedures for firing incompetents or by 20-year pension packages.”
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‘Obstruse’ looks like a real word, but it’s only a portmanteau of’abstruse’ and ‘obscure’ – two words that happen to live in the same conceptual neighborhood. (And there’s an old post observing that the real word ‘obtuse’ sometimes gets used the same way: http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/forum/viewtopic.php?id=144).